Morris, Norval Ramsden (1923–2004)

Biographical Details

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1923, Morris received his law degrees at Melbourne University and a PhD in Law and Criminology at the University of London. He held several academic posts before serving as the Japan-based Director of the United Nations Institute for the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders from 1962 to 1964. From 1964 until 1994 Morris was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School. He served as Dean of the Law School from 1975 to 1978.

For more than 50 years, Morris worked to advance both the theoretical understanding of his field and to further its effective practice by teaching and mentoring generations of lawyers, policy makers, and scholars. He provided counsel to various components of the criminal justice system, including acting as a federal court's Special Master concerning issues of protective custody at Stateville Penitentiary (Illinois), and serving for more than 25 years on the Advisory Board of the National Institute of Corrections (and as chairman from 1986 to 1989).

Early Work

Morris began his academic career exploring the question of recidivism. He expressed concern about preventative detention and the relevance of prison behavior to the prison release decision. He ultimately asserted that “at the time of sentencing as good a prediction as to when the prisoner can be safely released can be made as at any later time during confinement” (Morris, 2001, p. 186). In the 1950s, Morris also addressed the problem of unjustified sentencing disparity, and argued in favor of systematic, scientific studies on questions of crime and punishment, an approach that was not widely followed at the time.

The Development of Penal Goals

Morris was one of the early advocates for punishment limited by principles of just desert. According to him, desert is “an essential link between crime and punishment. Punishment in excess of what is seen by that society at that time as a deserved punishment is tyranny” (Morris, 1974, p. 76). While Morris has contended that equality should merely be a guiding principle in part because of finite resources, he has strenuously argued that desert is a limiting principle—an absolute requirement—of just punishment. The punishment must be deserved, or, in Morris's term, it must be within the range of potential punishments that are not undeserved. To further determine an appropriate sentence, Morris has suggested following the concept of parsimony, which requires that the “least restrictive (punitive) sanction necessary to achieve defined social purposes should be imposed” (Morris, 1974, p. 59).

Despite his rejection of rehabilitation as a justification for imprisonment, and contrary to much of the scholarly and political rhetoric of recent decades, Morris repeatedly argued that rehabilitative programs remain crucial to both the theory and practice of incarceration and other sanctions. The important point is that such programs should be voluntary and should not be used to increase the length of an inmate's sentence.

...